India in Africa, Africa in India: Indian Ocean Cosmopolitanisms

7. Politics and Poetics of the Namesake: Barlen Pyamootoo’s Bénarès, Mauritius

181 7 Politics and Poetics of the Namesake: Barlen Pyamootoo’s Bénarès, Mauritius Thangam Ravindranathan Oh! Mourir à Bénarès! Mourir au bord du Gange! —Pierre Loti, L’Inde (sans les Anglais) Où va la mémoire / quand nous perdons la mémoire? —Khal Torabully, Appel d’Archipels (ou le livre des miroirs) Introduction “How would it make you feel to live somewhere and know there was somewhere else with the same name in a different country?” Such is the question posed by Barlen Pyamootoo’s Bénarès (1999: 40).1 And it is perhaps as much the question that disconcerts as the context in which it arises. This turn-of-the-century Mauritian novel spans but a few hours, the duration of a return journey. The latter half of the narrative features the homebound leg of the journey, as the protagonists drive from the capital Port Louis in the north of Mauritius to their native Bénarès in the far south. The women who are their companions for the night inquire about the place for which they are bound, feared for its remoteness, its rumored backwardness. In response the unnamed narrator and his friend evoke the derelict state of a village mourning its abandoned sugar mill; they speak of its former employees who have long left or still wander about idly; of playing football in grounds presided over by a grotesque chimney, sole vestige of the deceased mill. But as the titular destination approaches, this text of restrained melancholy charts a different sort of journey. “How would it Thangam Ravindranathan 182 make you feel to live somewhere and know there was somewhere else with the same name in a different country?” asks the narrator suddenly, unaccountably , to the women. So it is that the specter of the other Benares (the city in India and a place of pilgrimage for Hindus) irrupts onto the scene, and that a bound journey through a known landscape suddenly reveals an unsuspected element of unhomeliness. The structure of detour (via the other) resonates in interesting ways with Homi Bhabha’s notion of how in modern time the past, present, and future continually haunt each other, instead of staying in their “proper places” (1994: 4). Indeed, the same could be said of modern spatiality. But there is a cryptic quality to Pyamootoo ’s evocation of Benares, which—within the fabric of a text that reads as explicitly post-identitarian—projects a reimagined horizon but seems to suspend closure of the questions thereby implicated. What I propose here is a layered, personal sort of interrogation of the context—historical (cultural) and literary—that is mobilized (even as it is silenced) by Bénar ès. Only grudgingly does this narrative invite the recovery of a forgotten history; more urgently it seems to demand that one heed the irreducibility of the haunting: How would it make you feel to live somewhere and know there was somewhere else with the same name in a different country? Benares: Deconstructing Loss The land where the Ganga does not flow is likened in a hymn of the Kashi Khanda to the sky without the sun, a home without a lamp, a brahmin without the Vedas. —Diana L. Eck, Banares: City of Light The question, once posed, haunts the homebound journey, its careful, not to say somehow painful, unfolding structuring the economy of the prose. When prompted, the narrator describes the pilgrimage town on the banks of the Ganges, which he claims to have visited the previous August: Hindus believe they’ll go to paradise if they die in Benares . . . [ . . . ] And that’s how it’s been for centuries,[ . . . ] lots of people head there as soon as they feel the first signs of death. They leave their homes and their families and embark on what are sometimes very long, arduous journeys just so they can die in Benares and be sure of going to paradise. (Pyamootoo 2004: 41) The portrait of Benares drawn by the narrator is one that reduces it to its token features: burning ghats, moribund pilgrims, buses advertising the attractions of dying on holy banks. A long monologue further expounds Politics and Poetics of the Namesake 183 on the theme of Benares as the final resting place to which Hindus from all parts flock in slow and miserable fashion (43–45). What emerges from these lines, and from all that concerns the other Benares...